Fire-boat response crews as they battle the blazing remnants of the BP offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon, April 21, 2010. BP continues to be dogged by compensation claims relating to the accident.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Record investment levels are being rewarded only with declining output; market share is being lost on one side to the hulking state behemoths of Russia and the Middle East and the smaller, more fleet-of-foot companies that hop around the U.S. shale fields.

For BP, changes are afoot. The Wall Street Journal reports that a new business will manage its onshore oil and gas assets in the U.S.’s lower 48 states. No small potatoes, the operations make up around 17% of the company’s resource base and around 13% of its total production, according to Barclays.

Chief Executive Bob Dudley hopes this spinoff will enable the company to compete more efficiently with those nifty independents.

The creation of a self-contained unit will naturally spur talk that it could be spun off.

BP does plan to sell $8 billion or so of assets this calendar year, after all.

This week a federal appeals court rejected BP’s effort to stop Gulf Coast businesses from collecting payouts from the settlement fund, even when they can’t directly trace their losses to the 2010 oil spill.

The ruling appears to leave BP on the hook for billions of dollars more in payments than it originally estimated when it reached a settlement in 2012 with tens of thousands of businesses and individuals along the Gulf Coast.

At the heart of the issue is the network of transformers, the hulking gray boxes of steel and copper that weigh up to 800,000 pounds and make it possible to move power long distances. These appear to have been specifically targeted in the California incident.

Buying and installing a transformer is time-consuming and labor intensive, the Journal reports. They can’t be bought off the shelf, and it can take weeks or months to ship transformers in.

MARKETS

Brent crude had, by Wednesday, lost all the gains it made as a result of tension surrounding Russia and Ukraine to trade below Friday’s close, as some signs emerged of a possible dialogue between the countries. The possible return to the market of Libyan crude oil also weighed on prices. You can read the Journal’s latest oil-markets report here.